Soma so·ma (sō’mə)
- pl. so·mas or so·ma·ta (-mə-tə)
- The entire body of an organism, exclusive of the germ cells.
- The axial part of a body, including the head, neck, trunk, and tail.
- The body of a person as contrasted with the mind or psyche. 1
“What you have is a word that stands for both the physical body and the immaterial mind,” says Thomas Grip, creative director of Frictional Games, who next week will release SOMA.
SOMA is a science-fiction horror game set in an underwater research facility containing machinery that believes it is human. Following the release of Amnesia: The Dark Descent in 2010, Grip and co. have been hard at work on SOMA, which will release on the 22nd of September.
SOMA is a science-fiction horror game set in an underwater research facility containing machinery that believes it is human. Following the release of Amnesia: The Dark Descent in 2010, Grip and co. have been hard at work on SOMA, which will release on the 22nd of September.
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Gamers and industry professionals alike are immensely looking forward to SOMA, especially my colleague Patrick Klepek, who according to this
tweet is quite excited for the game. Touted as a psychological horror experience, Grip dives into the game’s narrative:
“Basically, you have a set up, and the premise for this set up is still secret. We’re keeping this secret because we want players to go into the game and get this question of, ‘Shit, what happened here?’ There should be some sort of philosophical conundrum, and it’s very important that that come fresh,” Grip explains.
“Otherwise, you’ve got Simon, who’s our protagonist. Contrary to Amnesia, he has a proper backstory and a proper personality from the get-go. You start playing as Simon as he’s in this place that he doesn’t know much about, and his situation is unknown to him. He finds himself in a run-down underwater base, where this weird black goo has penetrated the walls, and seems to be taking over stuff. You see these strange robots walking around, some are outright monsters, some think of themselves as human.”
“The narrative is that Simon needs to figure out what is going on here, and he’s going to need to get an understanding of his place there. He’s on a certain mission that he needs to get completed.”
“As a tangent, when people played our alpha in its early days, when they got some of the early questions answered, they felt like everything else was pointless. Normally, you’d say, ‘Well that’s a bad premise,’ but I was glad because they should be feeling like everything is pointless,” Grip explains.
“At the same time, we don’t want them to stop playing the game, so we needed to reconcile these two things. Later when we had a beta test, no one complained about this, some simple tweaking seemed to solve the issue.”
There are certain themes that Frictional Games are including in SOMA, all of which boil down to philosophical conundrums. One of these themes, as Grip explains, is, “how do you deal with this thing? I think this is an interesting theme to explore in video games, and horror is sort of driven by this. In a game, you need to be the person that progresses the storyline, even if that is simply pushing a button to move you forward.” […]
